OpenAI’s letter to Governor Newsom on harmonized regulation

The US faces an increasingly urgent choice on AI: set clear national standards, or risk a patchwork of state rules—some subset of the 1,000 moving through state legislatures this year—that could slow innovation without improving safety. Imagine how hard it would have been to win the Space Race if California’s aerospace and tech industries had been tangled in state-by-state regulations impeding transistor innovation. That’s why we’ve just sent a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom calling for California to lead the way in harmonizing state-based AI regulation with national—and, by virtue of US leadership, emerging global—standards.

We’re calling for a different approach: have companies adhere to federal and global safety guidelines while creating a national model for other states to follow. We recently became one of the first large language model companies to commit to working with the US government and its new Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) to evaluate frontier models’ national security-related capabilities. In our letter, we urge avoiding duplication and inconsistencies between state requirements and the safety frameworks already being advanced by the US government and our democratic allies.

As we outlined in our recent California Economic Impact Report, the AI sector is already driving tremendous innovation and adding billions to the state’s budget, with the potential to deliver even more jobs, growth, and opportunity. California is uniquely positioned to strengthen its status as the world’s fourth-largest economy—but only if it continues to create the conditions for AI to thrive here.

In particular, we recommend that California treat frontier model developers as compliant with state requirements when they have entered into a safety-oriented agreement with a relevant US federal agency, like CAISI, or when they’ve signed onto a parallel framework such as the EU’s AI Code of Practice (which we also signed).